Op-Eds

Even as political commentators speculate that the power of the Obama presidency has been severely curtailed as a result of the Republican victories in the House along with increased GOP representation in the Senate, the Obama/State Department juggernaut continues to grind away at Israel's security and sovereignty.

Last week's historic "shellacking" suffered by the Democrats was a stark and humbling reminder to all elected officials of whatever party that they serve at the will of their constituents.

This election season in the United States was not a great one for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Republicans and the tainted Emergency Committee for Israel launched mendacious ads and campaigns against pro-Israel Democrats across the country threatening the historic bipartisan support for Israel that has existed in Washington. The lies in these campaigns have been called out by an array of independent journalists from The New York Times to Salon, and politicizing support for Israel in this way has been condemned by key figures such as Israel's U.S. ambassador, Michael Oren.

If you scratch a Holocaust denier long enough, you may reveal an anti-Semite, but not always. You will, however, probably find someone like the morally repellant Kaukab Siddique, a Pakistani-born tenured associate professor of English and journalism at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, who seemingly puts great faith in conspiratorial dramas in which a crafty and all-powerful enemy (i.e., Jews) weaves oft-repeated claims about the Holocaust just to elicit the world's sympathy and promote Zionism and the creation of Israel.

In case you didn't notice, olive trees in Judea and Samaria are under attack. The alleged culprits are Jews living there. UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry called it "terrorism."

Clearly, fall has come to Central Pennsylvania. The crisp air, the vibrant array of autumn colors, and, yes, a whole lot of leaves to rake. With the arrival of my favorite season, I know Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

Although Israel's economy stands strong amid a world recession, the political future of the Jewish state has perhaps never looked bleaker. Iran's nuclear threat looms large, Israel's West Bank settlements may soon become part of a Palestinian state, and Jerusalem stands threatened with division.

In what country were you born? If you are a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem, you'd better not look for the answer on your passport. That line is always left blank.

Every year at around this time, my husband and I have the same spirited debate: Public Displays of Judaism (PDJs) - good or bad?

The common wisdom is that CNN's Rick Sanchez was fired because he made anti-Semitic remarks. That's an understandable assumption, but it's also untrue. Sanchez was fired because he attacked a celebrity more liberal and more popular than he is. That he did it with racial overtones made it easy for CNN to pull the plug on him. But his real crime was that he had become an embarrassment, from a liberal perspective, and that's the only perspective in the media that counts.

Intermarriage is without doubt destroying the American Jewish community. There are approximately 5.6 million American Jews, some 2 million of whom live in households identified as non-Jewish. Better than half the Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion. Whereas before 1965 only 10 percent of American Jews who married did so outside the faith, that percentage has jumped over the past two-and-a-half decades to at least 52 percent.

We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews. For the first decades after Israel's founding, this war was conventional in nature. The goal was straightforward: to use military force to overrun Israel. Well before the Berlin Wall came down, that approach had clearly failed.

In recent weeks it has become abundantly clear that there is one pathological way in which Israel differs from all other countries. Israel is the only place on earth where large portions of the country's "intelligentsia" think it obscene and "fascist" to expect people seeking citizenship in their country to express loyalty to it.

Everything we experience in life serves as a hands-on lesson concerning our purpose on earth. Consider this: Thirty-three miners plunge into two months of darkness 2,000 feet below the surface, disconnected from their source. After 69 days of eternity, the moment they were praying for arrived. Their dream became a reality. They would finally see the light of day, the joy of freedom, the hug of loved ones, and the tears of their children.

Even a one- or two-month extension of Israel's ten-month settlement moratorium, senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has announced, won't suffice. Nothing less than a total freeze throughout the duration of Israeli-Palestinian talks would be acceptable.

If one makes his way beyond the outskirts of Kiev and continues deep into the forests of the neighboring village of Radomyshl, he soon enters an unmarked clearing.

Anyone who thinks Prime Minister Netanyahu, in order to improve relations with the U.S., should succumb to American pressure in return for a U.S. incentives package and extend the freeze of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria is either mistaken or misguided.

Even before his eyes open in the morning, the kollel student has in his head the rapid-fire flow of verses, laws and teachings from the prior day's learning. The words of Modeh Ani exit his lips while he reaches to shut the alarm before it wakes his family. Soon he will be on his way, confronted with many topics of halacha and hashkafa.

Israel is a magical country, but to experience one of its greatest wonders you have to travel out to what the world calls the West Bank and the Bible calls Judea and Samaria.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that colleges and universities redress racial and ethnic discrimination or risk losing their federal funding. Thus, if African American or Hispanic students are harassed on campus, they can complain to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is mandated to enforce Title VI and ensure that their schools fix the problem.

Now that we've suffered, yet again, through the annual United Nations circus, has it occurred to anyone (other than New York City police officers) to question why we continue to tolerate the hypocrisy and waste of it all?

An exciting newcomer has arrived in the turbulent arena of Israeli politics. In her fiery speech during the recent countdown ceremony in the Revava settlement that marked the end of the ten-month moratorium on construction in Judea and Samaria, Tzipi Hotovely seized the moment. She eloquently encouraged the synthesis, so long deferred, between Judaism and Zionism. Even in her first term in the Knesset, at the age of 31 and its youngest member, her future impact already seems assured.

We are winning the war on child abuse. We shall fight this war until we win. We shall fight the abusers in the yeshivas, the synagogues, the mikvehs. We shall fight them in the hills, the valleys, on the land and on the beaches. We shall fight with every ounce of our strength, until we win.

The Torah is defined as flint, a hard stone that is sturdy and unbreakable. It is therefore ironic that the year 5770 saw the Torah stretched as a rubber band - with the extremes causing the fraying of the bonds of Torah and Klal Yisrael and with no respite in sight.

ABC News decided to put the overtly biased and under-informed Christiane Amanpour in the host chair for "This Week." The result is a weekly display of journalistic malpractice. This past Sunday was no different. Questioning David Axelrod, Amanpour assumed the blame for the blow-up of the peace talks will lie in Israel's hands:

Former president Jimmy Carter told NBC News last week that his work at home and abroad has been "superior" to other presidents. "I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents," Carter assessed. "Primarily because of [my] activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center and in international affairs, and, to some degree, domestic affairs."

Let's not be fooled. The opening weeks of the United Nations General Assembly feature numerous side meetings between Jewish organizations and dozens of visiting dignitaries. Many of the Europeans, and possibly some Arab delegates as well, will be expressing sympathy if not encouragement for Israel's potential need to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

America is engaged in an intense debate regarding the plan to build a mosque and Muslim community center near Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attack on New York. A wave of criticism has been growing against establishing a mosque at this site, the very idea of which elicits overwhelming pain as the horrible crime was committed by followers of extremist Islam via the manipulation of its symbols and the belief that they were acting as messengers of God.

The latest headliner in the campaign to silence critics of Israel's radical Left is Prof. Zvi Hacohen, the new rector at Ben Gurion University. A professor in chemistry and "desert research," Hacohen was cited at length in Haaretz (Sept. 15) denouncing people, especially students of the Zionist Im Tirtzu movement, who dare criticize leftist sedition.

Supporters of the planned mosque and Islamic center near Manhattan's Ground Zero have focused on the issue of religious freedom. But as thousands of mosques have already been built throughout America, this is false - a straw man if ever there was one.